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Copyright is akin to property rights. If you have the copyright to a piece of work, you own the work. You can do whatever you want with it. License it in one way or another, etc...
In the case of Canonical Copyright assignment, for every contribution:
- the author of the contribution keeps full copyright over his work. He can, for example, license it differently to some other project at any time (until he dies or copyright expires, at which points it becomes public domain).
- Canonical gains conditional, shared copyright over the contribution.

License is a set of rights given by a copyright owner, to a given individual or group of person. Theses rights mostly concern use, modification, redistribution, merchantability, etc..
The copyright owner can provide multiple licenses to multiple overlapping groups. If a user has multiple licenses for the use of a given work, he can choose any license he wants, and is not bound by the licenses he is not using.
=> A company that has access to the code through the GPL license and a (payed for) non-transferable permissive license is not bound by the GPL.

Licenses (as opposed to contracts) are revokable. It is not known if the OSS licenses (GPL, MIT, BSD, etc...) can be revoked, as it has never been tried in court (almost happened, once, but they settled before judgement). Maybe yes, maybe not. Probably not easily, and not everywhere, and well, nobody managed it yet.
By any means, you would need all the copyright holders to revoke the license (and a court to find that legal) to completely close a project.
In the case of Canonical, it means the original contributor must do the same.
But actually, as Canonical promises in a contract to license the contribution with its original licenses (the licenses they were using at the time of submission), it actually means that even if the contributor tried to revoke it, Canonical couldn't.

So, what can be done by canonical:
- license a contribution as closed-source, modify the contribution without licensing the modifications under GPL. Basically, fork the contribution under closed-source. The contributor can do the same, but only for his work, not the full
what cannot be done:
- revoke GPL license to the contribution, ie retroactively close source the entire project. There is a yet untested risk that they could retroactively close their own code, but that's not Canonical specific.

Hmm, does XMir/XWayland start just one X server, or one X server per app? Or can it do it both ways?

The aim is to have one X server per app that requires X (hence the potential better performance of xMir/xWayland + MirWayland over X.org, because each app just fullscreens into its own X server, which reduces the work and roundtrips done by these servers).
The videos here are one XMir server with a full compositor in it, so all apps in a compositor in a XMir X server in a Mir server (hence the not so good performance).

One word: freedom. Because they can. They can fork the whole kernel and create their own modified version and then create the coolest marketing campaign on Earth and wipe the floor with all the other distros.

Right, I skimmed it the last time I reread it to check if I was just misreading when everyone said Mir would be 'at the earliest' in 14.04. It clearly says, tho, Mir (through XMir) will be used by default in 13.10, without X.org server fallback in 14.04. Also, this strengthens my point that Unity will actually run in real life on XMir, not only in 13.10, but in the LTS 14.04.

And the really sad part is, Xmir (Aka Xwayland) was not made to run DE's, Major Fail on Canonical's Part putting it into an LTS, it's just going to end up bad for Ubuntu users all around, Canonical need's to put down the pipe, if it fuck's up an LTS it is going to look really bad on them, why use Xmir over Xorg? you take a lost in performance's, add bug's etc.

And the really sad part is, Xmir (Aka Xwayland) was not made to run DE's, Major Fail on Canonical's Part putting it into an LTS, it's just going to end up bad for Ubuntu users all around, Canonical need's to put down the pipe, if it fuck's up an LTS it is going to look really bad on them, why use Xmir over Xorg? you take a lost in performance's, add bug's etc.

I think so, too, that's why I kind of assumed the plan of running Unity 8 there was still on. I agree, liking or disliking Unity or Mir, switch this way is a bad decision. They make the LTS use Mir without any benefits, and with likely performance drawbacks. It would make a lot more sense, if they want to test Mir with 13.10, to go back to the usual X.org for LTS and then switch to Unity 8 and Mir in 14.10.

You should probably check on that fanaticism of yours. When you start wishing for others to die due to differences in opinion, you're treading on dangerous ground. Pretty soon, you'll end up in a warehouse somewhere, drinking juice laced with potassium cyanide because your glorious leader promises eternal life on a faraway planet where all computers run Mir...

you know what the best part is

Jono Bacon @ Martin Gräßlin we haven't said that KWin works on Mir, we have said that it works on XMir on Mir. This is not a falsity, it does work. I feel we have been pretty clear that it is XMir and not Mir.﻿

Ingolf Schäfer @ Jono Bacon "I’ve absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir. And I’m pretty confident Mir will be on a lot more devices than Wayland. Which would be good for KDE and Kubuntu and Plasma Active." said by Mark Shuttleworth himself in this blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1235﻿

If an application loses 30% of performace, that comes no were near 1 secon (1000ms) lag.

Pretty true, people is exaggerating things up. As some one else said FPS means frames per second, so a 1 second lag means 1 frame per second.

Originally Posted by mrugiero

The people who says XWayland will be faster than plain X means using it for apps. Running a desktop implies a lot more work on the X.org server inside that you can ignore otherwise. You are having window management, compositing, etc, inside the X.org server. When you use it for an app, the app inside the server will behave (if I get it right) somewhat as a fullscreen window in a non-compositing environment, and all the real management will happen outside the X.org server, being done by either Wayland or Mir. So you avoid lots of operations. Of course a whole desktop running on XWayland will be slower than at least a native desktop on Wayland, and almost certainly than a desktop on X.
And the same way XWayland could be faster than X for particular apps it's likely that, assuming Mir will be faster than X, XMir will be faster than X for particular apps. Whole desktops are out of scope for XMir and XWayland for common sense. There is no reason to not use X if you are going to use an X desktop, since you will be unable to load Mir or Wayland apps.

I understand that running a desktop environment on top of xmir/xwayland is just a waste of resources, but I still don't understand the technical details behind saying that running just applications under xwayland/xmir will result in faster rendering for X applications than running them in X directly.

Anyway it seems that canonical gave a shot at running a full DE to keep the development adrenaline going on or shut the people at kubuntu saying that ubuntu and kubuntu flavors would not be able to co-exists due to mir.

One of the reasons for this result set is missing composite bypassing support, which we are aware of since January. Composite bypass helps when apps/benchmarks run fullscreen because… well, because they don’t need to be composited. Gamers out there… there is hope and a plan in place to get you your precious FPS back. This feature/bug is currently scheduled once other key functionality landed. Also, in order to make FPS based benchmarks really count, we need eglSwapInterval(0) implemented, which is currently in progress

Copyright is akin to property rights. If you have the copyright to a piece of work, you own the work. You can do whatever you want with it. License it in one way or another, etc...
In the case of Canonical Copyright assignment, for every contribution:
- the author of the contribution keeps full copyright over his work. He can, for example, license it differently to some other project at any time (until he dies or copyright expires, at which points it becomes public domain).
- Canonical gains conditional, shared copyright over the contribution.

License is a set of rights given by a copyright owner, to a given individual or group of person. Theses rights mostly concern use, modification, redistribution, merchantability, etc..
The copyright owner can provide multiple licenses to multiple overlapping groups. If a user has multiple licenses for the use of a given work, he can choose any license he wants, and is not bound by the licenses he is not using.
=> A company that has access to the code through the GPL license and a (payed for) non-transferable permissive license is not bound by the GPL.

Licenses (as opposed to contracts) are revokable. It is not known if the OSS licenses (GPL, MIT, BSD, etc...) can be revoked, as it has never been tried in court (almost happened, once, but they settled before judgement). Maybe yes, maybe not. Probably not easily, and not everywhere, and well, nobody managed it yet.
By any means, you would need all the copyright holders to revoke the license (and a court to find that legal) to completely close a project.
In the case of Canonical, it means the original contributor must do the same.
But actually, as Canonical promises in a contract to license the contribution with its original licenses (the licenses they were using at the time of submission), it actually means that even if the contributor tried to revoke it, Canonical couldn't.

So, what can be done by canonical:
- license a contribution as closed-source, modify the contribution without licensing the modifications under GPL. Basically, fork the contribution under closed-source. The contributor can do the same, but only for his work, not the full
what cannot be done:
- revoke GPL license to the contribution, ie retroactively close source the entire project. There is a yet untested risk that they could retroactively close their own code, but that's not Canonical specific.

It sounds like you have more of an issue with copyright assignment than the license itself.
While I admit CA isn't the best solution, it does assist a project to change licenses if they feel the desire to.
For instance, VLC had to remove code from libvlc since they wanted to relicense it as LGPL, but they couldn't contact a contributor who's code was under the GPL.
They eventually changed the license, but the process took months to do. And some projects are so large, such as Linux and Wordpress, that even if desired the license cannot be changed.
And Canonical isn't the only organisation that does this. OwnCloud, Cunity, Diaspora*, Apache and software from the FSF all require CA's or your contribution has to be under a permissive license such as MIT for specifically the issue of license changes.
And I'm sure that with CA you don't relinquish your rights over your code, you just give a copy of your rights to someone else.
To use a proprietary Mir as an example, there would be nothing stopping you from banding together with the other Mir developers, pooling your code together and creating a FOSS competitor.